After never having gone to a sleep-away camp myself, I became a counselor at Camp Ma-Ho-Ge in the summer of 1970.  My cousin, Mitchell, turned me on to it.  I was a 17-year-old high school student and this was my first time away from home; at least, it was my first summer of doing something other than stay in a bungalow colony or take a road trip with my family.  It certainly was the first time I shared living quarters and a bathroom with a dozen or more strangers and slept in a bunk bed.  I loved it!

I spent two summers at Ma-Ho-Ge.  The first summer I had little girls and the second summer I had girls who were almost as old as I was.  I remember the faces of many of my campers.  And, I’m still in touch with my bunkmate, Amy.  We also went to high school together.

There are a few memories that stand out more than others.  Some are pretty bizarre.  For example, I remember, in my first year, standing clueless in a bathroom stall while my senior counselor shouted instructions on how to insert a tampon.  I’m sure the applicator came out eventually. 

I remember my one and only camping experience.  It was a rainy night and I led a bunk full of little girls into the woods for a night in the great outdoors.  I finally got them settled down and ready for a bedtime story.  Unfortunately, that story was told by a lifeguard who had come along for the hike and it was all about the “Cropsey Monster” – aka the Boogeyman – who kidnapped (and, according to the lifeguard, fed on) children.  That was an unfortunate choice.  What was even more unfortunate was that I had a sleeping bag with a broken zipper and an unwanted visitor – a skunk who tried to snuggle in to get dry.  So, after the little girls and I stopped screaming, we all gathered our belongings and took a soggy walk back to the bunk. 

Sadly, I attracted skunks all summer.  They seemed to show up late at night when I was on babysitting duty, just sitting there with my salami sandwich minding my own business.  Getting sprayed by a skunk on the way to a tryst with the lifeguard in the middle of the night was also a drag.  It’s not like we had vats of tomato sauce to dump over our heads.

I remember another adventure in which I had a rowboat full of little girls out on the lake.  We were going fishing. What did I know about fishing?  Nothing.  We were using Cheerios for bait and all we caught were our socks.  We also managed to catch a crayfish.  Once that sucker was in the boat, all the little girls jumped overboard and I had to save them because they really didn’t know how to swim yet.  Good thing I was trained as a lifeguard, too.

Nineteen-seventy was the year after Woodstock, right there in good old Bethel.  One night, another counselor and I decided to go to Max Yasgur’s Farm and check out the scene.  All traces of the festival were gone, but we decided to reenact peace and love on a blanket taken from his bunk.  Suddenly, a light was shining in our eyes.  A New York State trooper had discovered us canoodling in the grass.  We said we were counselors at a nearby camp and he told us he would escort us home.  After I got into the car, my buddy said, “Don’t panic but I have a huge stash of drugs in the glove compartment.” 

Jesus!  Don’t panic?  Of course I was going to panic – but the cop never checked.  We were lucky.  We could’ve landed in Sing Sing.

Two life-altering events occurred during my tenure at Ma-Ho-Ge. One occurred in my first summer and one occurred in my second.

In the first, I came back to my bunk to find a newspaper article on my bed. The article was about a friend from high school who was spending the summer in Peru as a foreign exchange student. Her plane had crashed into a mountain in the Andes and she had perished there.  This was a girl I was close to; someone who I had gone through confirmation class with at Temple Emanual in New Hyde Park.  I was too young to lose a friend.  I ran out of the bunk and jumped right into the lake.  I think about Jerilyn to this day.

The other occurred in the summer before I started college at Brandeis.  I went out for pizza with a group of counselors.  I ordered a Coke with my meal.  Shortly after I had a sip, I noticed that I was seeing everything from the perspective of the chair.  That, in itself, was strange and disorienting.  When I tried to walk, the floor was coming up toward my face and I was walking down toward the floor.  I was trying to make it to a phone booth to call my parents but my voice sounded way too low.  My drink had been laced. 

I made it back to camp with the other counselors but instead of going back to the bunk, I wandered into the pitch-black woods.  A young blond man followed me.  I suspect he’s the guy who laced my drink. He’s also the guy who made sure I got back to my bunk.  And, when I started Brandeis that fall, his face was the first I saw in the bookstore, but we didn’t acknowledge each other.  Maybe he was the Cropsey Monster.  I certainly don’t recall him being a counselor at Ma-Ho-Ge. 

At any rate, in the same week, I met a woman in my dorm named Leslie and we became close friends.  Turns out, her uncle was Max Yasgur!

You gotta love the smallness of our world.

So, that is the extent of my sleep-away camp experience.  Camp Ma-Ho-Ge was my one and only.  And, I’m happy to still be a part of its enduring community.  We are the last of the Ma-Ho-Geans.